Friday, October 15, 2010

Yesterday I upgraded my Ubuntu 9.04 desktop to 10.10 . Mostly because repo support for Jaunty has ended. What I did was a very irresponsible and risky thing simply because UBUNTU UPGRADES DON'T WORK. Ok, they sorta do, but just the smallest "dependency error" will at best doom you for hours of tweaking and at worst ruin your install forever. That wouldn't be a huge issue if dependency errors didn't happen ALL the time when upgrading from a ubuntu version to another...

And that's just when upgrading between two versions that are 6 months apart. Upgrading from Jaunty to Maverick multiplies the headaches by 9 (no, not by 3) and is very risky.

Why did I do it?

Why did I wait until 10.10 instead of just upgrading every month to the next version? Well, I was very happy with 9.04 and I am also lazy. I didn't need to upgrade until Jaunty Jackalope support ended.

Why didn't I just do a clean install? Well, that's what I am asking myself. The thing is that I can resist some hours of tweaking config and fixing errors, but I have been using this ubuntu install for at least 5 years now (I am quite sure it starting in Breezy Badger times) and thus I have tons, and tons of config and installed packages. If I went with a clean install, I would not have as many trouble getting the computer to work, but I would have to reinstall (read: download) tons of packages, and will also have to reconfigure things to suit me.

If you do not have patience or skills to be locket into ubuntu recovery mode (no UI) for 6 hours trying to fix stuff using command line you should definitely NEVER upgrade and ALWAYS do a clean install to the newer version, you'll live longer.

Anyway, if you are in my same situation, were using Jaunty and now want to upgrade you have two solutions: a) Upgrade to each consecutive version step by step using the update manager. Since those upgrades are supported, they will give you less issues. I didn't do it because I have low bandwidth and thus that process would have taken me three weeks...

Or b) This:* Edit /etc/apt/sources.list (for example gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list)* Optional/recommended : Get rid of any repository that is not from official ubuntu, just in case. You can add those repositories back later.* In that file, replace every instance of "jaunty" with "maverick"* now open a command line and do "sudo apt-get update"* Then do "sudo apt-get --download-only dist-upgrade"

What will happen is that ubuntu will try to update itself, and it will try very hard, but at one moment, it will fail, because a new package will conflict with an old package that was meant to be removed but for some reason wasn't, thus the thing will halt and will tell you there were issues installing one of the packages. You have no choice than to decrypt the terminal text and find the name of the package that is causing the conflict. Then do "sudo apt-get remove packagename" . Chances are that about 20 packages depended on that package... So it will tell you a big deal of dependencies that cannot be met. Your only chance is to do "sudo apt-get remove packagename1 packagename2 .. packagenameN" for ALL the packages, including the one you want to remove and those that required it. Then you will have to do dist-upgrade as well and repeat, and repeat.

Eventually, dist-upgrade will finish. But you have probably removed a big deal of packages... So you better try at least getting the basic stuff:

"sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop"

Then cross your fingers.

What happened to me It is not the first time I upgrade ubuntu, it is not the first time I upgrade between two versions separated by more than 6 months either. I was expecting all that dependency mambo. So I eventually reached the end of dist-upgrade. But when 10.10 booted... I have no mouse or keyboard in the graphical interface! ARRRGGG Things like that can happen because when trying to fix all those broken packages your system got horribly disconfigured.

After hours of trying to overcome it doing things like reconfiguring X server, removing nvidia drivers and others. It finally stroke me... Perhaps I just need to use the newer kernel. I was using the old one because I didn't update my grub's menu.lst (as since my setup is very old, updating menu.lst automatically will screw the formatting up and remove the windows XP entry). So I modified it to use the newest kernel.

Then X crashed (darn). But it turns out it was a simple issue, the kernel no longer loads the "nv" driver but the "nouveau" one so I just changed the driver used in xorg.conf.

After all of that my keyboard and mouse worked. I am using 10.10 already, however, there is a horrible, horrible issue, my Desktop's emblems and icon size data is lost! :( I will have to resize them and add emblems again :(

I seriously think that all ubuntu upgrade mechanism should be full of giantic warning signs before letting a user do it. I think there may be users out there finding howtos about how to upgrade to avoid a clean install and following them... No, people, do not upgrade unless you want to suffer. Do NOT upgrade.